Today I uploaded 150 random photos taken at the 2008 SASAD Congress at Danville Girls High School into my gallery. If you are interested in purchasing a digital copy of the photo (which will be high res and unwatermarked) please contact me via email. I will send you an invoice and then prepare a place for you to download the images.

There are some additional photos that were taken of the acrobatics class that I still need to get online, so if you are looking for those, please bear with me - I’ll have them up soon (I hope!).

I’ve been fielding some questions on what is involved in setting up a WordPress website for my customers, so I have put together a little post of what exactly is involved and what it will cost you. Here are the brass tacks:

• Step 1: I will install and set up WordPress for you on a Club 1000 hosting package.
• Step 2: I will populate the WordPress database with the basic information you want to have on your pages. For instance, if you want to have three pages that contain Contact Information, About Us and Products, I will create those pages for you and put your own copy into them (I don’t write the copy for you, but if you want me to I will give you a quote).
• Step 3: A good starting point for WordPress users is to select a theme that most closely matches what you want the site to look like by visiting The WordPress themes Site. I will install and customise your theme so that it looks the way you want it to, with the links in the right place, the right fonts, colours, graphics, etc. There are many things I can do to make your theme totally unique, including the incorporation of any Flash Movies you have had made, Javascript menus, etc.
• Step 4: I will load up to three plug-ins for you and get them working. You just select the plug-ins you would like to use from The Plug-ins Directory. If you want photo galleries I will set up your first gallery for you (with about 20 images). If you want a shopping cart plug-in I will set this up for you and load your first 20 products.

Once these steps are completed your site will be ready to be shown to the world. If you have an existing domain name you would simply need to change the DNS at your registrar to that which is provided in your Club 1000 Welcome e-mail. If I have registered your domain name for you that would already have happened.

For these services, including the domain name, I charge a paltry US$650 (about R5,000). You are getting one of the world’s best Content Management Systems prepared for you and you’re also getting the best value hosting for one year thrown in too.

If you think you can do it on your own and you’d like to just ask me the odd question to get yourself going, the best thing to do is spend an hour or two with me in person or online using Skype or the regular phone. My rate for consulting on anything to do with web design is $50 (about R385) an hour.

Many people who ask me to build them websites are disappointed when I tell them that simply having a website is not suddenly going to shoot their business off into the stratosphere and that they are not suddenly going to appear first on Google’s search engine results pages (SERP’s).

There’s this expectation that once you have a website and you do certain things to it, you are instantly Google’s best friend and whatever is on your first few pages should immediately be high up in the SERPS. Well, the bad news it that’s simply not gonna happen, no matter how much search engine optimisation and how many meta tags you build into the sites code.

Getting good SERP rankings with Google (and other search sites) takes time and patience, but even then, the single most important thing that determines where your website ends up on the SERP’s is the amount of good quality content you have on those web pages of yours. Once people start to see quality content on your site they will probably link to it. The more links you have coming into your website the more importance the search engines attach it and the higher you feature in SERP’s. This takes time (and of course content).

So what things can you do to get more content on your site?

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A lot of the time I sit at my workstation and receive Skype calls from friends and would be clients. Sometimes its not practical to use the computer speakers and microphone on my MacBook, so I bought a Skype handset that runs on USB. Don’t like it. Firstly I don’t have enough USB ports on the Mac and secondly the cord sucks (it isn’t one of typical stretchy phone cords).

So I started wondering how it would be possible to get Skype on my cellphone? In South Africa a lot of the functionality of cellphones is stripped out by the networks so that they can milk us for those expensive cellphone calls, as well as data, so I wasn’t holding out much hope of finding a solution, but lo and behold, I discovered www.fring.com.

Basically Fring is an application for your phone that logs you into all your online chat services, such as Skype, AIM, GoogleTalk and a variety of SIP providers. Fortunately my phone (Nokia E65) also has wi-fi, so I can use that as an access point and enjoy all those services including Skype voice for only the cost of the data I am using via that access point. I can walk around the house and use my Skype service just as I would a regular cellphone service. Why, just this morning I called my buddy in Auckland New Zealand!

It’s also freed up some of my screen real estate because with Fring running on my phone I don’t even have to be logged into Skype on the Mac. If I am roaming out of the wi-fi range it will log me in whenever I am in range of another of my access points, so if I set up 3G/GPRS on the cell network as one of them I can make and receive Skype calls on the go at the cellular data rate.

Pretty cool stuff!

I finally have my international website hosting company up and running in the form of dallasdahms.net.

This new website venture is 100% owned by myself and caters for a global market. Already I have clients in Europe, the United States and Australia who are happily hosting their websites on my servers and enjoying not only very reasonable rates, but also the best kind of website hosting you can get. It’s fast, easy to use and it can do just about ANYTHING you need online (blogs, e-commerce, forums, etc).

If you are a South African person or business, buying hosting from me will make what you’re getting locally look positively backwards by comparison. I have had a look at the prices being touted by some very big names in the hosting game and they are ripping SA consumers off like you wouldn’t believe. I have heard of companies paying over R400 a month to host the most basic of HTML sites. That’s just plain silly.

With me you get one invoice, once a year.

Click the link below to visit my hosting site:

www.dallasdahms.net

Still just R700 a year for any website, regardless of how advanced it is, including a free international domain name.

Why pay a bloated monthly rate to some amorphous corporate entity for crippled hosting, when you can pay just once a year and save a bundle (and maybe a WASP too)?